Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig Talks New Album, Confronts the Haters

"The best thing I can do is recognize that people don't know anything about me."

Photos by Napoleon Habeica

On January 29, 2008, Vampire Weekend played a show at NYC's Bowery Ballroom celebrating the release of their self-titled debut LP. The gig was filled with hometown supporters who knew all of lead singer Ezra Koenig's twisty words. The band went through their limited repertoire with precision, but it was tough to imagine these neat and tidy-looking Columbia grads really breaking through to the large-scale audiences that seemed to inevitably await their early hype.

Fast forward a year and a half and I watched the same four guys make thousands of fans briefly forget about the cold rain that fell upon this year's All Points West Festival. They were tight, confident, and-- dare I say-- a little tough. And their new songs sounded fantastic. This was one of those times I was happy to be wrong.

The band's second album, Contra, is out on January 12, 2010 via XL. I was lucky enough to hear it last week, and I can report that fans of their first LP probably won't be disappointed. Not to say that it's a retread, though. There are change-ups-- two straight-up ballads, a warped reggae track, a sprinkling of AutoTune-- but the overall vibe remains enthusiastic and unafraid.

I recently spoke with Koenig about what people can expect from the new material, how to deal with the privilege of first world problems, and why Vampire Weekend may be more punk rock than you think:

Pitchfork: The Contra album cover is really striking-- what's the story behind it?

Ezra Koenig: The picture is an actual candid document of a person in New York City in 1983-- those are the clothes that she was wearing and how she did her hair that day. We didn't hire one of our friends to throw on a vintage Polo shirt or anything.

Pitchfork: Her expression is intriguingly blank-- it almost looks like she's frightened by something behind the camera. What was your initial take on her overall vibe when you saw it?

EK: The first expression that I read into her was some sort of hesitation. We had a lot of discussions trying to figure out how old this person was when the picture was taken-- she could be 15 or 27. The ambiguity of her age and expression made me feel like she was on the cusp of something, which really matches the vibe of the new album. Because you see people in their 50s with a family and children, and they can have a look of self-assuredness. But people between 13 and 30-- the age range seems to grow every year-- don't have that sort of stability. Sometimes it comes across in the way that you carry yourself. Wrapped up in her expression is this question: "How is she feeling?" Maybe she wasn't even really sure at the time.

Pitchfork: Who is she?

EK: I don't want to give away all the details about the photo just yet, but I learned that she's now living in Malibu.

Pitchfork: You've said that the aesthetic of California played a large role in shaping Contra. Were there any specific West Coast cultural touchstones that were particularly inspiring?

EK: I watched a lot of 80s L.A. movies like Repo Man, where Emilio Estevez plays this So Cal Holden Caulfield who doesn't have a sense of purpose and only comes to find himself by getting this really bizarre job repossessing cars and going on an insane adventure. In a very weird way, it's a coming of age story because he's trying to figure out what he wants to do in a totally bat shit crazy world.

I found myself relating to a lot of that movie's characters. There's one great scene where this punk gets shot while trying to rob a convenience store. He's dying and starts complaining about how he blames society for killing him, and Emilio Estevez says, "That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me." And the guy says, "Yeah, but it still hurts." He's a small character in the movie and you don't know his family background or anything, but it's a tender moment because you get this sense that even though he's living this anarchic punk lifestyle, there's still this really sympathetic side to him.

EK: When people try to frame us as these spoiled rich kids, I want to say, "Well, hold up. You don't know anything about my family, you don't know where I went to high school, you don't know how I paid for college." I mean, I grew up in New Jersey listening to the Ramones, the Clash, Elvis Costello, and I was always keenly aware that a lot of punk was created by people who came from middle-class backgrounds. Whether some people can accept the idea that I probably grew up listening to the same music as them isn't my problem, ultimately. But in my experience, a lot of people don't feel that way. We have 14-year-old kids coming to our shows, and those kids aren't thinking, "Can I listen to Vampire Weekend and the Clash?" It's not an issue.

But even trying to engage in that conversation is ridiculous and petty, because essentially it's just a bunch of college-educated people trying to compete for who has it tougher, when the truth is none of us had it tough. The best thing I can do is recognize that people don't know anything about me, and keep making music that interacts with the things that I like, be it punk rock or Repo Man. It's very easy to say that worrying about finding a path or a job that makes you happy is a first world problem, but it doesn't make you an asshole for doing it.

Pitchfork: Do you feel like you've gotten more comfortable with admitting that your own first world problems are still valid?

EK: Yeah, the people I've met who really inspire me are those who take the horrendous inequality of the world very seriously, but also have compassion for any number of problems. I wouldn't even try to claim that I've made it to that level myself, but I think that's the goal. You can't even begin to trust people who say they are concerned with equality but act like assholes. In every basic way, compassion is just an enormous thing that has to cover the micro and the macro of your life. That sounds very new-age-y, but it's a basic approach to life.

Pitchfork: What are some of the lyrical themes you're going for on Contra?

EK: I didn't want any simple "fuck rich elitists" kind of songs. A lot of people define themselves in opposition to other things, like, "Everybody but me is an asshole or a hipster or a first world baby." It's easy to write a song that just takes down easy targets-- there were songs like that on the first album, though some people misinterpreted them. It's more of a challenge to write a song that's about compassion toward people that you disagree with or people that represent something you think is reprehensible.

Pitchfork: All that seems pretty heavy, but it's still a really upbeat record.

EK: It's funny that it sounds so dark and serious when we talk about it. Ultimately, the point of thinking about heavy issues in all these different ways is to improve the way you live and the way you treat people, and that's an upbeat thing.

Pitchfork: You mentioned how people misinterpret your lyrics. Are there any examples you can think of where you were like, "Oh wow, that's totally wrong."

EK: On the last album, some people thought the first line to "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance" was "the devil swam the backstroke," which is just bizarre. But when I say people have misinterpreted stuff, it's mostly critics and people who don't know me. With the first album, I noticed some people would never give us the benefit of the doubt about any lyrics that referenced class or education. They would be so offended that a song would be called "Oxford Comma" that they didn't understand how it's a song about anti-elitism. They want to be the anti-elitists, so they make us out to be the out-of-touch assholes. I don't think it will be as easy to do that with this album because there's more of a clarity to the lyrics.

Pitchfork: On the album's last track, "I Think Ur a Contra", it seems pretty clear that a "contra" has a negative connotation, but I've never heard the word used quite in the way it's used on that song.

EK: That song basically defines our own version of the word. I'd like to think that song straddles the line between straightforward love song and something more ambiguous. But what's so interesting about the word "contra"-- and why people make a big deal of it as an album title-- is that it means so many different things that are linked by the root of the word, which is "against." So even though it refers to the counter-revolution in Nicaragua, and the video game, and the contrabassoon, and Marx-contra-Hegel, it all means the same thing. It's an incredibly basic, primal idea. "Contra" might have all these deeper connotations, but it's actually a neutral word; it implies conflict, but it doesn't imply which side is better.